1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a location awareness apparatus and method for recognizing a position using a camera; and, more particularly, to a location awareness apparatus and method for recognizing a position of a portable terminal such as a mobile phone and a personal digital assistant (PDA) using a camera and an electric compass, which are externally or internally mounted at the terminal in a predetermined space with a position identification tag disposed.
This work was supported by the IT R&D program for MIC/IITA [2006-S-003-01, “Research on service platform for the next generation mobile comm.”].
2. Description of Related Art
Location awareness Methods are classified into a network based location awareness method and a hand-set based location awareness method.
The network based location awareness method measures a time difference of signals from a plurality of mobile communication base stations and calculates a location of a cellular phone user based on the measured time difference at a predetermined server.
The hand-set based location awareness method calculates the position of a hand-set based on global positioning system (GPS) signals from a plurality of satellites, network signals, or the combination of the two signals.
GPS or mobile communication network based local awareness systems were designed for an outdoor environment. Accordingly, the GPS or mobile communication network based local awareness systems could not recognize a position of a user in an indoor place, an underground place, and a shadow area of a building due to the low precision of a signal, signal attenuation, and multipath problem.
Lately, local awareness systems using an infrared ray, an ultrasonic wave, and a radio frequency were introduced for detecting a position of a user in an indoor place. However, such local awareness systems need additional devices for receiving and transmitting the infrared ray, the ultrasonic wave, and the radio frequency, which are disposed at predetermined locations in the indoor place. Also, a corresponding portable terminal must have the equivalent functions of the additional devices. Therefore, such local awareness systems have a disadvantage of a high cost.